Background

Bernadette has been attending the Craft Café for 4 years. Craft Café programmes provide people aged 60+ with the opportunity to access an arts workshop and support from an artist in residence. The workshop is a place where they can learn new skills, renew social networks and reconnect with their communities. Craft Café takes place in both community and care home settings.

Bernadette retired at 59 and had a very challenging working and personal life, impacting on her health. After a long period of hospitalisation, she moved to Govan, where she was introduced to the Craft Café in 2015.

 

Craft Café helps immensely with Bernadette’s mental health. She came to the Craft Café following her release from hospital and it remains a steady, supportive place.  She explains the Craft Café has helped enormously, reflecting ‘it has not only helped my life but I believe it has saved my life.’ She believes that after coming out of hospital she would have otherwise stayed at home, and believes the Craft Café prevented her from going into hospital again. 

Furthermore, Bernadette attributes Craft Café with helping her to reduce and manage her physical pain and increase her exercise routine. She believes the exercises they do each day have helped, along with the friends she has made who she often goes on walks with after Craft Cafe sessions.

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Progress

Whilst Bernadette believes Craft Café has been an invaluable support network and community for her, she has equally become an invaluable and active member of the community.  Craft Café has been able to support and encourage her to achieve extraordinary things within the community. Her biggest achievement has been the success of the Summer Ball, which she organized alongside the Craft Café. Bernadette raised £750.00 for the Craft Café, in recognition of the support it has given her and others who have similar experiences.

She recently founded the ‘Befriending Food Experience’ with her partner, which aims to tackle loneliness and isolation, and offers ‘food, fun and friendship’. Bernadette’s partner visits older people in their homes who are isolated and cooks for them. He also brings them to the Craft Café and introduces them to other members to help tackle their loneliness. Using their experience of studying Graphic Design & Illustration, one of the Craft Café tutors, was able to work collaboratively with Bernadette to create posters and logos for the ‘Befriending Food Experience’, introducing her to Photoshop and creating creative content in a new digital medium.

Bernadette is brilliant at connecting people in the community, and the Craft Café is her main place to achieve this. She is caring and generous, sharing her knowledge with fellow members and news of any events that are happening within the community. She is also incredibly kind, putting other members at ease and making them feel welcomed.